The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society,historical time period in which they live,personal troubles, and social issues

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited.

Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.

Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!

Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.

Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?

All that time I thought she was my future, I was wrong. She wasn't my future at all. She was the door to my future. But I'm through that door now, and ready to close it behind me.

There is nothing like a challenge to bring out the best in man.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

We were birthed with one soul to take care of, and we must take care of it.

I don't read like other people do - back and forth, across the page. I tend to scan a page at a time.

Just keep following your damn dreams, it just costs a lot of damn money. I'm broke, but I have a dream.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

I thought I was an odd person, and since my hometown had only about 70,000 people in it, I knew I was going to have to leave there and go out and find other odd people.

You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.

I think right now a lot of albums that are out there, they sound like mixtapes.